I just finished the game a few minutes ago. I'll have to wait a bit for my final impressions to set in but overall I had a blast playing the game. And WOW, that last boss battle was intense! Damn spikes and satellite things drove me crazy!

Kudos bytor!! and I concur... that last boss actually gave me trouble... its like everything is going just dandy and then "BAM!!"- enemies regenerated, your slapped with debuffs and "chaos" gets cast all in perfect succession to completely ruin your day...

Wow...REALLY disagree with the article on this game. NNK, throughout the game, made me feel like I did in the 80's when I first played video game RPG's.

I thoroughly loved the title myself, but the difference between NNK and games from the 8 bit and 16 bit era was innovation. This stuff was new and exciting then. Now its just exciting because it is rare.

While I still get a sense of nostalgia playing titles like this and newer entries in the tales series, without the aforementioned magic being "new" to me in some sense it remains "nostalgic"... and the calender still reads 2013...

That is not to say I don't love it. I do. Just in different respect than I did say breath of fire or secret of mana the first romp through those titles.

I sort of thought that was the main point of the article. That is, the editorial was not written to denounce NNK but to exploit the lack of innovation in the genre as of late. At least that was what I took from it.

EDIT: Although I do realize the editorial does lay into Nino pretty hard, I sort of just took that as the way he chose to get his point across and not the actual intent of the writing.

Right now IMO it is a GotY contender, although I think I've got an uphill battle there... :-D

Still not completed, no idea how far to go, but enjoying it immensely. Wonderful battle system with a fantastic mix of old and new, wonderful story... I keep waiting for it to all fall apart, but it just hasn't happened yet.

I actually played for 3 hours after finishing the game doing side quests and extra stuff, so....no argument from me as far as GotY, and @Kylde...I now despise the word chaos LOL!

I think the editorial is more about how most jrpgs just continue to fall back on story devices they've been using since the beginning and that part of the reason we enjoyed them in the past so much was simply because we were younger and more easily satisfied plot-wise. A lot of people talk about needing innovation in this genre but i don't know, it's one that embraces tradition very tightly and making something radically different is risky.

As for Ni no Kuni, I definitely agree that anyone who has played a lot of jrpgs will feel like they've experienced this plot before. The battle system is kind of bland and just usually boils down to spam aoe attacks with your strongest familiar(dinoceros). The biggest enjoyment factor in the game for me was just seeing all the monster/environment designs by studio ghibli. They also should've probably put in some gameplay in the human world, I dreaded going back there every time the plot demanded it since I knew it was just going to be talk to NPC for a few minutes.

On a side note, the "dark and tortured past" of one of the antagonists reminded me of the boss from dark cloud 2 for some reason.

Well I officially finished all the post game stuff today. Save, the last few (time consuming) items I would need to craft to complete the alchemy quest. I have seen everything Nino has to offer....

Enjoyable as it has been I do feel rather cheated in the ending. I thought all the post game stuff would bring closure for me... it has not... although I am glad I did it all because it certainly did lend a great deal to fleshing things out. And without spoiling anything about it I just want to say I found the conductor himself to be a very amusing character :)

I feel like after accomplishing all the post game crap you should be able to beat the game again and get a better ending or something.I can officially say this is one of my favorite ps3 RPGs. Didn't beat Tales of Graces F or Disgaea 4 for me though. Close, but no cigar as they say.

Yeeeee-up!! And I stand behind that statement :) This gen provided some fierce competitors vying for the title of "Chroma's favorite PS3 JRPG" but very few managed to capture my heart and swallow my time like Nino... then again very few had world maps, and even quasi- acceptable gameplay for that matter...